The Technical Board is considering to grant upload privileges to Romain Francoise for emacs-snapshot. The decision wass deferred due to time constraints, and it was agreed to continue this conversation in email or at the next meeting.

cdrtools update

We are expecting to receive a summary from Eben Moglen regarding his interpretation of the licensing terms for cdrtools, and will take next steps based on that.

Meeting 2008-10-21

Members present: Scott James Remnant, Matt Zimmerman

Upload rights for pre-MOTUs

The technical board has received requests for upload privileges from developers who are not yet MOTUs. On further investigation, the cases were three:

One developer was frustrated with sponsorship delays for updates to Hardy, and requested upload privileges in order to work around that. It was agreed that it would be better to improve the sponsorship process for stable maintenance, and Daniel Holbach will work to organize a team of developers who are especially interested in maintaining stable releases (particularly LTS).

Another wished to sync their package from Debian, and found this process too slow as well. Daniel agreed to investigate this as well to understand the problem and see how it could be improved

Another believed (as did their sponsor) that they would not be accepted for MOTU based on their contributions to a small number of packages in main, and that an upload ACL would be a better solution. This led to a prolonged discussion about how the MOTU council should evaluate applicants with regard to the scope of their packaging work, which it was agreed to continue by email. Matt Zimmerman will start a thread on ubuntu-devel.

Reinhard Tartler asked the Technical Board for a statement of policy regarding the use of codecs potentially associated with patents. The Board has neither legal expertise nor the knowledge of the specific patents involved, and has therefore sought third-party legal advice.

The cdrtools saga continues, with an active dialog between Eben Moglen of SFLC and Joerg Schilling of cdrtools. The outcome of this dialog is not yet clear, but if the two participants can reach agreement on the legal status of cdrtools, it will be able to be restored to the Ubuntu repositories.

Wine Team

Wine 1.0.1 is in Intrepid, and releasing it for Hardy as an SRU is underway

Wine-gecko is in Intrepid; Wine no longer needs to connect to the internet to download the gecko rendering engine once an application needs a fake internet explorer.

I (Scott Ritchie) am considering locking the Wine Team on launchpad and removing all members who don't need to upload to the PPA, similar to the move done by the 5-a-day team. From what I can tell, I'm the only active member of the team anyway despite over 60 members on launchpad for over a year.

I want to make an instructional Wine YouTube video, demonstrating how much better it is these days. I'm still actively seeking ideas for applications to include, especially ones that don't work on Vista itself (eg 16 bit apps).

Wineconf has left me with a large todo list of user interface improvements

Wine 1.2 will likely be in Jaunty's timetable provided someone can implement USB support within the next four months. Otherwise, Alexandre won't start the stabilization process for a new release.

Mobile Team

A dummy ISO was prepared which allows booting ubuntu-mobile and -mid USB images as hdb in kvm/qemu/etc.. The bochs BIOS CMOS params don't allow to boot of disk 2, so it's convenient to boot from the ISO.

A team member also did some work with Canonical hoping for a US Store, his work is detailed here: Land's End Ubuntu Goods but Canonical ended up launching a US Shop, negating our need for the Land's End shop

A couple of Philadelphia members are working on a new potential project with NTR, details posted to and discussions have been had our mailing list and forums:

Ubuntu Women

Full Circle Magazine

#17 was released on Fri. 26th September.

#18 will be released on Fri. 31st October.

We have received four books (for review) from Apress, two from No Starch Press and one from Pragmatic Programmers. These will be reviewed then used as competition prizes. In future FCM will feature ads for any companies wishing to support FCM with review material(s).